Monday, December 31, 2007
Hilary Claims Experience
Never having been questioned as to wether she inhaled, Hilary is claiming Obama lacks experience. She is right about that. But one should also question the experience Hilary claims.
Obama hasn't shrunk the military, but increased the number of fatalities in peace time.
Obama hasn't failed the US on medical insurance, nor the world on intervention in times of need. Yugoslavia? Somalia? Rwanda?
Obama didn't humiliate Yasir Arafat on the verge of a peace deal negotiated with Israel. Cigar anyone?
Obama didn't gut the CIA in the Middle East and contract to the NSA. Still, you can understand why William did: No news means it can't be bad news.
Clintons team up on Obama
ReplyDeletefrom news.com.au
HILLARY Clinton and Bill Clinton are raising new questions over her White House rival Barack Obama's experience, warning perilous national security decisions loom for the next US leader.
The Clintons' one-two punch comes four days before Iowa's closely fought caucuses open the US presidential nominating season, and are the latest bid to paint senator Obama as too green to serve as US commander-in-chief.
"I think that my experience is unique, having been eight years in the White House, having, yes, been part of making history," senator Clinton told ABC News, four days before Iowa's caucuses open the 2008 US presidential election nominating season.
Senator Clinton said she had unsuccessfully urged her husband to intervene militarily to halt Rwanda's genocide in 1994, and then traveled to Uganda to say sorry to the victims of the atrocity.
"I personally apologised to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies," she told ABC.
Last week, a New York Times report said senator Clinton had not attended National Security Council briefings or had access to classified intelligence while first lady.
"I had direct access to all of the decision-makers, I was briefed on a range of issues, often provided classified information," she said, adding she was accompanied by top US security officials on the road.
On Saturday, former president Bill Clinton made a pointed reference to the September 11 attacks in 2001, arguing that the next president had to be ready for sudden, national security challenges.
"You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough ... to deal with the unexpected," he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in New Hampshire.
"There is a better than 50 per cent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency, something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign.
"President Bush never talked about Osama bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina. And if you're not ready for that, then everything else you do can be undermined."
Mr Clinton's comments were reminiscent of the Bush administration's successful gambit of framing the 2004 campaign against John Kerry as a question of who was most fit to lead a global war on terror.
The issue of experience has taken on even stronger importance in recent days, as candidates brandished foreign policy credentials after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The former first lady also said that the ex-president would not have a formal role in her White House - despite his eight years behind the Oval Office desk - but would act as an close personal advisor.
But John Edwards, pushing senator Clinton and senator Obama hard in the Democratic race laughed that it was "complete fantasy" that the former president would keep out of White House policy.
"You watch him out on the campaign trail and he spends an awful lot of time talking about his views and not as much time talking about Senator Clinton's," he said.
Senator Clinton has contrasted her years traveling the world and senator Obama's single term in the Senate, saying America needs someone ready to lead from "day one".
But senator Obama, locked in a dead heat with her and John Edwards in Iowa polls, argued Sunday he had more experience in global affairs than Bill Clinton did when elected in 1992.
"When Washington gets challenged with respect to change, then their immediate response is you haven't been in Washington long enough," senator Obama told NBC News on Sunday.
"I would simply point out that the same arguments that are being made about me were made about him back in 1991 and 1992."
Senator Clinton's comments on Rwanda appeared to be a new jab at senator Obama, who last week said his multi-ethnic background and childhood years abroad meant he was more in touch with the world than someone who had taken tea with US diplomats.
Shortly afterwards, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright recalled how senator Clinton had traveled to scores of remote villages and refugee camps.